Few words are less meaningless in political discourse than "extremism," as people are extremists only in comparison to what is mainstream at the moment. Today's extremism becomes tomorrow's moderation under a different system.

You would think that, at a certain point, liberals in the U.S. with any dignity would get sick of being used and abused by Democratic Party candidates. Don't expect the dysfunctional relationship between liberals and Democrats to get any better for 2017.

Despite its recent big win, the tea party wing in the U.S. Congress has no more than the ability to say no, to wreak havoc and to generally make House Speaker John Boehner's life miserable. Insiders still set the agenda.

Americans should worry about a new Pew report on political polarization not because there's too much genuine ideological competition, but because our most energetic citizens appear to be dividing every more coherently into factions that can't stand each other.

The primary election defeat of the second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives by an unheralded economics professor upends the conventional wisdom that the tea party had slid into oblivion.

A new study on political polarization in the U.S., conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, uses large sample sizes and impressive graphics, but its interpretation is exaggerated.

The American urge to declare victory when nobody has won, to divide factions into fast friends and evil enemies, to ground complex decisions into simple, overriding principles rather than complex trade-offs poses a security risk.